Electronic Eucharist

Ren works across digital and physical media to examine relations among bodies, matter, technology, and nature. Begun in June 2023, Electronic Eucharist is an invisible and expanding hyperobject inspired by neologism.

In literature, angels often act as technical media between the divine and the human. They communicate through a sacred mirror whose silence gives it power. Postmodern bodies likewise communicate through invisible networks and connected devices. Their opacity makes these systems more powerful than the individuals who depend on them. This system is the Electronic Eucharist.

Electronic Eucharist imagines a system that links the individual to all things. Within it, the heavy body disappears and presence becomes light, diffuse, and close to the pure spirit desired by postmodern life. Like a cybernetic organism, the Eucharist learns, adapts, and evolves.

The work draws on neurobiological research into tactile adhesion and memory. Carbon-based cognition filters immense amounts of sensation: when a finger slides across a phone, the brain suppresses touch and privileges the information on the screen. Ren retains the tactile encounter and places what the finger touches within an open, star-like field. The resulting bodies propose a cyborg condition in which existing boundaries begin to dissolve.

"Carbon-based life worships smoothness, using its largest organ as a precise instrument of pilgrimage," Ren writes. "A fingertip touches the light of silicon life: a future truth, and an act of dissolution and rebirth." Soldering clamps, Fresnel lenses, and other industrial components cut into the softness of wax-like organs, joining biological feeling to mechanical structure.

Text adapted from Shanghai Gallery of Art